


Accompaniment

by Auntie_Diluvian



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Amnesia, F/F, F/M, I Can See Clearly Now, Multi, Quizás Quizás Quizás, Songfic, and more winners yet to come, do these tags frighten you?, i'd like to apologize to toby fox and also god, reader sings, short little chapters, they frighten me a bit but i'm really just here to have fun, they're good songs though Brent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-05 19:58:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16817419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Auntie_Diluvian/pseuds/Auntie_Diluvian
Summary: Charging off into the unknown, armed with nothing but your wits and your reflexes, staring down certain death with stoicism-yeah, that's not you.YOU have a head injury. YOU get winded going up the stairs. You should probably hang back. Tori's not so bad once you get used to her, anyway.





	1. Quizás, Quizás, Quizás

On the fifth night, she asked you: were you truly content to stay?

You were, for the time being. Not indefinitely, of course, but it only made good sense to be prepared before you left.

That was your primary goal: preparedness for whatever lay beyond the ruins, and it was a _distant_ pinprick of light, to be sure.

First, there was your head injury, or whatever it was that was affecting your memories. You’d always thought of amnesia as a lazy writing device, overused on soap operas. And that one 80s movie, what was it called? The one with the blonde lady and… there were kids, probably? Oh, and also the one with the fishes, though you weren’t as bad as-- right, Finding Nemo. Tick that one off the list. You were able to remember certain things, mostly useless trivia, and only when you weren’t trying to. Couldn’t remember your old phone number or next of kin, but thank _god_ you could remember the name of the volleyball from Castaway and how many Spice Girls there were.

Staying with Toriel not only helped keep you sane, it kept you talking, and talking was the only thing you’d found so far that helped you remember anything, even the dumb, useless stuff.

Second, besides not being able to remember anything about your own world, you knew next to nothing about this new one, and Toriel’s knowledge of it was even more exhaustive than her library. While you still didn’t exactly have a plan, if the rest of the Underground was really as bad as Toriel feared, you knew your chances of survival were approximately zilch if you didn’t do your homework and study up.

Third, physically speaking, you were too weak and soft and untrained for the journey. As little as you remembered about your life before, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that your daily pastimes had been more... indoor oriented, and whatever outdoor activity had landed you here in this place had most likely been a fluke, especially judging from the stiff brand-new-ness of the hiking boots you’d been wearing when you fell and the intact plastic collar on the bottle of sunscreen you’d had in your pack.

This consequence of your past lifestyle, combined with abysmally slow reflexes, had already almost gotten you killed, just by some of the local monsters who hadn’t even really meant to hurt you. You needed intense physical training if you ever wanted to walk out those doors with any confidence, and that took time. Plus, you’d been putting it off. Old habits die hard, or so you assumed. You wondered if you had a gym membership, somewhere up there, all that money paid into it going to waste. Oh, well. You sure as hell couldn’t cancel it now.

Toriel was delighted that you were going to stay. You suspected she was desperate for company, as she had more than a few eccentric habits and would sometimes forget you were there at all. She talked to herself almost as often as she talked to you, and it took her a few weeks to relearn the meaning and spirit of the word ‘privacy’, but mostly the two of you took to cohabitation like a fish takes to water; which is to say, as far back as your memory went, there never was an alternative, but it suited you and kept you alive.

Your daily regimen of reading and learning and training seemed to soothe her nerves, and before long she stopped worrying you would try to leave unexpectedly. She hovered and fretted around you less, but kept an eye on your progress.

She found some old dumbbells and let you keep them. You stored them in the basement, and took to exercising down there as well, since the air below was a little cooler on your skin. Toriel also spent a good deal of time in the basement, though you didn't think she was doing squats or burpees. Perhaps she just needed a little extra time to herself, to meditate in the cool, quiet, earthy darkness. You couldn’t blame her for that. It was a dreary corridor, though, always a bit damp and musty, as it was more of a naturally formed cave tunnel than an actual basement. One day, you tripped on the last few steps on your way down. You weren't injured, but when you stood, you found that every part of you that had hit the ground was coated in a thin layer of grime, so you resolved to make your next project cleaning the place up.

Toriel found you a huge push broom for the job, and effective though it was, using it tired you out quickly. Leaning on the broom handle in the dim light, some kind of learned reflex kicked in, and you found yourself humming a tune as you caught your breath. It wasn't something you were making up on the spot, it had a shape and a rhythm- a real memory. Still not particularly useful in the grand scale of things, but precious all the same, and you didn’t dare let it slip. Memories were so flighty; they would only come when they weren’t being coaxed, so you kept working, pushing the heavy broom with tired arms and an aching back, until at last, words came along:

_Siempre que te pregunto_

_Que cuándo, cómo y dónde._

_Tu siempre me respondes_

_Quizás, quizás, quizás._

_Y así pasan los días_

_Y yo desesperando_

_Y tu, tu contestando_

_Quizás, quizás, quizás_

_Estas perdiendo el tiempo_

_Pensando, pensando_

_Por lo que mas tu quieras_

_Hasta cuándo, hasta cuándo._

You sang the song six times, ten, perhaps twenty. You lost count. It was the only song you knew, and you were going to make damn sure you’d remember it this time. The acoustics of the empty stone hallway were delightfully reverberant and you enjoyed the ghostly echo it gave your voice.

Before long, you finished sweeping and began tidying up so you could go back upstairs. You had moved your dumbbells to the bottom stair when you first started sweeping, so you set to replacing them along the wall so you and Tori wouldn’t trip over them. In doing so, you dropped one of the heavier ones on your toes, and though you were wearing your sturdy hiking boots, it still hurt like a motherfucker. You interrupted your own song with a bellowed litany of curse words, but when the pain and your shouting at last subsided, you heard quiet laughter, not from the direction of the house, but from the other end of the corridor.

You limped down the hallway and rounded the corner, but the door was still closed as ever, and you were alone.

“Hello?” you called out, but there was no answer.

You harrumphed and shrugged the noise off, turning to go back to the house.

You collided with Toriel just around the corner and yelped.

“Oh! There you are, are you all right? You were cursing up a blue streak!”

“Oh, yeah, dropped a weight on my foot. It's fine. What do you feel like for dinner tonight?”

And just like that, you forgot about the strange laughter from beyond the door in the basement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought for a while about which version of this to go with, but this is the one I had in mind when writing and it's the first one I ever heard: https://youtu.be/qKRFQ-QmHsQ


	2. Soli

Toriel had, for a week, been artfully dodging your every question about the chapter of the history book you'd been reading. Finally, you snapped at her out of frustration and shamefully retreated to the basement to pace and pout.

You tried singing to calm yourself down. You had found such peace in it the other day, but now the lyrics angered you.

 _Perhaps_ that was only appropriate, given your situation. _Siempre_ you were asking her, and _siempre_ she responded with some phony bullshit deflection, _y así pasan los días_. For how long? Fucking _hasta cuándo_?

You slid down the wall, banging your head against it. This was not cooling off, but you weren’t sure if you really wanted to, anyway.

“ _Quiz_ my _ás,”_ you grumbled, because you _had_ to, obviously.

A snort, from the end of the hall.

You stood and crept silently to the end of the hallway, to the door.

“You're... real... aren't you?” you asked, the question hanging in the air, as you had no idea to whom you had addressed it.

You also weren't sure what kind of answer you were expecting that query to produce, but more silence wasn't the answer you were hoping for.

You turned to go once more, but you were halted by the response, delayed.

“s’ that some kinda trick question?”

He spoke slowly, uncertainly.

“No, I just wanted to be sure I'm not losing my mind.”

“can't help ya there, i have no actual proof of my existence. for all you know, i’m just a disembodied voice in your head. but hey, uh, since you're here an’ all, knock, knock,” he said, knocking on the door.

“Oh! Uh, who’s there?”

“ivy lee.”

“Ivy Lee who?”

“ivy lee gotta scram now, but it was nice to meet’cha.”

You wrinkled your nose, though he couldn't see.

“Well, Ivy Lee hope you’ll stop by again?”

“ivy lee, ‘vy lee will- count on it. later,” he said, and you heard crunchy, snowy footsteps receding.

Unmistakably, snow.

This baffled you, since you were quite _emphatically_ underground and it was never more than mildly chilly in the ruins and the area surrounding Toriel’s house. Was this door fucker somehow _outside?_

“Wait!” you shouted, pounding on the door. “Wait! Come back!”

Had Toriel been lying to you, keeping you prisoner for no goddamn reason? You cursed yourself for ever trusting her, no _wonder_ she seemed so unstable! You could be gone, you could be home, you could be- hospitalized for your amnesia or whatever, but it'd still be better than _this_ -

You waited a number of seconds, and finally caught your breath when you heard the footsteps come back closer.

“you say somethin’ else?”

You gulped.

“Are you outside?”

Again, he almost made you think he wasn’t going to respond. Then he chuckled.

“what, uh, d’you- heh… outside of what, exactly?”

“Like, _outside_ outside. Y’know, sunlight, fresh air, all that good stuff?”

He burst out laughing, long and loud, yet wheezy and raspy.

“oh, shit. that’s a good one,” he said, winding down a bit. “oh man, thanks for that. ‘ _are you outside outside with the sun and the fresh air and the birds and the bees_ ’. goddamn, my sides hurt. yeah, keep on dreamin’, kid. shit.”

He crunched off into the snow once more.

“fuck me, _outside_ outside. classic,” you heard him mutter again before his footsteps faded out of earshot.

You slid down to the floor, back against the door, and sobbed weakly and snottily into your shirtsleeves until you felt numb enough to sneak back upstairs and clean yourself off in the bathroom.

You had been furious with Toriel in that instant, but you had also had the briefest glimmer of hope that maybe it really would be _that easy_ , to just open the door and find yourself on the other side, in the sun. No barrier, no race of creatures after your soul; no more training or studying, no more of the endless monotony you faced as long as you stayed with Toriel.

You didn’t really blame _him_ for laughing, whoever he was. You might have done the same if you’d been trapped as long as Toriel said they’d been.

You wiped your face with a damp cloth and went to find Toriel in the kitchen. You figured while you were feeling sympathetic to the plight of the monsters, you might as well go ahead and apologize for snapping at her earlier. You could give her time to tell you everything. Time was all you had to give.


	3. I Can See Clearly Now

It must have been raining, up above. The basement floor was slowly being taken over by puddles of water, and the dripping from the stalactites was an incessant reminder of where you really were. It got so bad you could hear it from anywhere in Toriel’s house.

“I suppose when you've lived with it so long, you can tune it out,” she said. “I actually find it quite relaxing.”

You missed  _ real  _ rain, rhythmic and steady white noise. This was more akin to a track from a Halloween sound effects album. It was beginning to keep you up at night.

You placed buckets beneath the drips, but that only quieted the noise for as long as it took for an inch of water to accumulate in them, and you still got no sleep to show for it.

When you came back to empty them the next morning, you stopped short, three steps from planting your foot in an inch of water.

“Oh, shit. Tori?” you shouted. “We have a situation!”

She came down to join you.

“My goodness!  _ What _ is going  _ on _ up there?” she mused, glancing upwards. “I don't remember the last time it rained hard enough to flood the basement like this.”

“And they say global warming isn't real.”

“Hmm,” she said thoughtfully, though you suspected she had never heard of global warming at all. “Well, no need to fret about it. Not unless we get a good 8 more feet of water. It's just rock, after all. It will outlive us both.”

Finally, the dripping stopped. It took nearly a week and a half for the water to recede and evaporate, and in its wake, the floor was once again covered in fresh grime, much of it slimy and organic. Drowned worms, dead spiders and cave roaches, leaves, soil, the occasional scrap of plastic candy wrapper. You were beginning to see why, despite Toriel’s tidiness and meticulous nature, she didn't bother trying to keep the basement clean.

All the same, you had grown attached to being able to use the space, and the water had left the room even chillier than before, which made it even better suited to working out in, so you took up the broom once more and set to work cleaning it out again.

You kicked one of the nearly empty buckets out of your way, and the noise of it bouncing across the floor set off a beat in your head.

Oh, yes, it was happening again-

_ I can see clearly now, the rain is gone, _ __  
_ I can see all obstacles in my way _ __  
_ Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind _ __  
_ It's gonna be a bright, bright _ _  
_ __ Sunshine-y day.

__  
_ I think I can make it now, the pain is gone _ __  
_ All of the bad feelings have disappeared _ __  
_ Here is the rainbow I've been prayin' for _ __  
_ It's gonna be a bright, bright _ _  
_ __ Sunshine-y day.

__  
_ Look all around, there's nothin' but blue skies _ _  
_ __ Look straight ahead, nothin' but blue skies

__  
_ I can see clearly now, the rain is gone, _ __  
_ I can see all obstacles in my way _ __  
_ Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind _ __  
_ It's gonna be a bright, bright _ _  
_ __ Sunshine-y day.

To be honest, you'd been getting a little tired of your one-track playlist already, and this was new and fresh and upbeat, and you were instantly addicted. You swished the broom for percussion, not quite doing justice to the reggae beat in your head, but it was better than nothing. You belted out the B-section over and over until you were out of breath.

What would you have been doing had you been free? You liked to imagine yourself going outside without an umbrella for the first time in a week, putting on sunglasses and eating your lunch on a park bench somewhere, the sun on your skin, almost too hot but worth it for the Vitamin D. Coming back inside with a little sweat on your hairline, just short of sticky. Cooling off in the air conditioning, still looking wistfully out the window. Listening to music like this, that promised that everything would turn out all right.

“still on about sunlight, eh, outsider? not still confused about where ya are, are ya?”

“Ivy?” you asked, jogging down the hall at the sound of his voice.

“ _ ivy? oh _ , oh right. heh. not my real name, actually. y’see, that's what we monsters call, ‘a joke.’”

You huffed. The first person interested in holding a real conversation with you besides Toriel in  _ weeks _ , and he was an unmitigated smartass.

“Well, you didn’t give me anything else to call you.”

“oh, right,” he said, and then he knocked on the door once more. “knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“d. u. noah.”

“Oh, god. D. U. Noah who?”

“d u noah ‘nother song or is it just the two?”

“Oh!” you said, blushing, “so you heard the other one, too? I thought you might’ve but we hadn’t been introduced, yet.”

“heh, yeah. thought it was weird, i’d never heard the other lady singin’ before, an’ then i realized it wasn’t her. but it was... uh… pretty. couldn’t understand a lick of it, though.”

“It’s Spanish. I mean- no, I mean- thank you. You know her? Oh, of course you do, that makes sense.”

He just chuckled at your disjointed line of questioning and your obvious fluster.

“so, how ‘bout it? any more where that came from?”

“Oh, right, sorry- no. Not yet, anyway. My brain kinda… got fucked when I fell. I’m still piecing things together and it’s taking a while.”

“oh, ouch. ‘s alright, though, i was just wonderin’. we don’t get much of a variety of new music down here.”

“Yeah, me neither, apparently. Ha,” you laughed sardonically. “But why not?”

“eh, we've only got, mm, ‘bout five or six musicians. only four good ones, and two o’ them mostly keep to themselves, an’ the other two are… kinda better in, uh, small doses, if you ask me. ‘sides that, mostly we just get whatever falls down here, which is pretty hit an’ miss.”

You hummed a thoughtful note.

“I fell down here, too.”

“that's uh, usually how this works, yeah.”

“So… am I a hit or a miss?”

He snorted.

“miss, you're a hit.”

“Aw, I bet you say that to every mysterious lady you meet through a door.”

“ah, heh- what? pffft,  _ no. who? _ nah.”

You clapped your hand over your mouth to stop yourself from cackling.

“Oh my god,” you said.

“it's- we're not- not that-”

“Shh, do you hear that?”

He paused.

“hear what?”

“...Do you have livestock nearby?”

“uh, no.”

“Then I think I'm starting to develop some kind of super hearing. Maybe it happened when I hit my head.”

“heh, what?”

“It's crazy, how well I can hear these cows! I mean, honestly, I could barely hear your voice over the sound of all the bullshit.”

“oh.”

“Isn't that so weird?”

“hilarious. look, it's not what you think-”

“-Oh my god, there it is again! It's almost like it happens every time you open your mouth!”

“yeah, good luck with your superpower. i'm gonna… leave, now.”

You booed him, and he left you alone at the door.

You bolted back up the basement stairs, nearly tripping upwards twice, and into the kitchen, where Toriel was sitting at the table with a book and a cup of tea.

“Tori, I-” you panted, “I met your boyfriend.”

Lukewarm tea sprayed everywhere.

“He is  _ NOT  _ my- did he  _ say _ that he was? No, no. Let me tell you a  _ thing _ or two about  _ that man _ .”

You pulled up a chair.

“Oh my god,  _ please _ do,” you said, propping your chin atop interlaced fingers, grinning ear to ear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://youtu.be/FscIgtDJFXg

**Author's Note:**

> small baby chapters small baby words
> 
> zzzzzz


End file.
